The disposal of waste tires has become a troublesome problem for sanitary landfills and municipalities across the country. Tires are manufactured to be durable; they withstand extreme environments and they do not easily wear out. These same advantageous qualities are what make them so hard to dispose of. In 1998 approximately 270 million scrap tires were generated in the United States, weighing 3.4 million tons. according to the EPA.
Why does it matter?
- When tires are illegally stockpiled or dumped, they can pose a hazard to human health and the environment
- Tire piles act as breeding grounds for rats and mosquitos.
- Mosquitoes can reproduce at 4,000 times the rate of their natural environments and they are vectors for West Niles, encephalitis, and other diseases.
-Fires in tire dumps have burned for months, are very hard to extinguish and emit many noxious pollutants to the air, water, and soils.
No one wants them :
In the world of junked items, tires have a bad rap. Homeowners cannot simply toss their tires out with the rest of the trash because junkyards will no longer accept them.. Unlike television sets, furniture and other classic trash items, tires are in a class all by themselves. What makes tires different from other waste materials?
-They are designed to be indestructible and cannot be compacted.
-They are expensive and difficult to shred and make into a marketable material.
-They are a bulky, non-compatible waste that takes up a lot of landfill air space.
-If dumped in the landfill, they work their way to the top and break through because the density of tires are one-third of water, making them "buoyant" in a fill.
-Landfills cannot stack tires like they can stack trash and operators want to maximize space as much as possible.
The public often assumes that the tires collected or gathered for recycling eventually will be reborn into new products. This is not always the case. While there are companies that accept
tires for processing (for a fee) only a few sell the reclaimed components for stock in the
manufacturing process. Many such firms chip or shred waste tires and then landfill the material,
passing the tipping fee and processing cost on to the original supplier.
Environmental, educational, and governmental agencies continue to seek out innovative and cost effective ways to utilize waste tires in to useful and environmentally sound products.
